The Man With the Guitar

The other day I posted about how the folk mass has essentially become the church norm these days, and that I can’t stand it. Aside from garden-variety sloth (definitely the major factor), it’s the reason I don’t go to church more often. When you go to church and end up just getting irritated — and not just irritated but feeling GUILTY about being irritated — it just doesn’t make you want to go back.

I had doubts about posting those sentiments, but I’ve since heard from clergy and from church goers expressing the same sentiments, some of them in rather strong terms.

I mean, I don’t need a Latin Mass and a fog of incense. I would settle — no, I’d more than settle, I’d be happy — with no music at all, just the bells that the altar boys used to ring every now and then.

Inevitably, the man with the guitar at these services gives off the glow of someone under the impression that he’s the star of the mass, the poetry to the priest or minister’s prose. The balance is way wrong.

I thought it was just me — namely that I spend so much time in my professional life enduring bad entertainment that I have no tolerance for when bad entertainment presents itself unexpectedly, that it’s an out-sized misery to me, but only me. But judging from some of your comments, it’s not only me.